Cowart is a former ballet dancer, a biologist who researched Pteronotus bats in the sweltering jungles of Costa Rica, and a self-described “high-sensation-seeking masochist.” They wrote this book to explore why they were like this, and whether their reasons matched up with those of so many other people who engage is painful activities of their own volition, whether for the pain itself, or the reward afterward. Full disclosure: Leigh is also my friend, but even if they weren’t, this book would have fascinated and engrossed me.

Hurts So Good is science journalism from a scientist-who-is-also-a-journalist, which means that the text is very careful in who and what it sources, citing its references, and indexing terms to be easily found and cross-referenced, while also bringing that data into clear, accessible focus. In that way, it has something for specialists and non-specialists, alike. But this book is also a memoir, and an interior exploration of one person’s relationship to pain, pleasure, and— not to sound too lofty about it— the whole human race.

The extraordinarily personal grounding of Hurts So Good is what allows this text to be more than merely exploitative voyeurism— though as the text describes, exploitative voyeurism might not necessarily be a deal-breaker for many of its subjects; just so long as they had control over when and how it proceeds and ends. And that is something Cowart makes sure to return to, again and again and again, turning it around to examine its nuances and infinitely fuzzy fractaled edges: The difference between pain that we instigate, pain that we can control, pain we know will end, pain that will have a reward, pain we can stop when and how we want… And pain that is enforced on us.

Cowart writes again and again that if BDSM is not consensual then it is abuse, that the forms of training done in ballet have a direct effect on disordered eating and body image issues, and that the kinds of pain which are not in our control can contribute to lasting trauma. And they also discuss how healing it can be to take back the control of pain in consensual BDSM, or the story of a ballet dancer who found themselves drawn to mixed martial arts as a way to process what was done to them in the ballet studio, and how using therapy to recognize and grapple with what has been done to us can sometimes allow us to differently understand what we want for ourselves.

There are no firm answers, in Cowart’s book. There are multiple perspectives, from neuroscientists, to the aforementioned ballerinas-turned-MMA-fighters, to ultra-marathoners, to people who compete to eat the hottest chilies in the world, to people who pierce the skin of their backs to hang suspended from hooks and bars, in public, to polar bear plungers, and more. There are overlapping feelings and descriptions in all of these people who seek to experience pain on purpose, but there is also a stunning multiplicity of backgrounds, of beliefs, of reasons to seek these avenues out, each one helping the reader to understand something more about both individual psychology and whole cultures’ relationships to pain.

[Cover image for Hurts So Good, featuring various hot peppers, handcuffs, a  sword, a whip, a snake, a hook on the end of a rope, and pointe shoes, all arranged around the words “Leigh Cowart— Hurts So Good— The Science & Culture of Pain on Purpose]

As someone who studies, among other things, the intersections of religious belief, ritual, and social life, I was absolutely fascinated by Cowart’s discussion of the role of ritual in how we experience pain and pleasure, both in the context of the preparations for dance or other sport or how competitors psych themselves up before a chili eating match or the constant call-and-response and check-in and aftercare process of a BDSM scene, but also in terms of literal religious ceremonies. Cowart discusses the flagellants of the Black Plague era, and mystics who fasted and meditated to achieve oneness with the Divine (a practice that also had clear gender-political valences, which Cowart also gets into). So one thing I’d’ve loved more of from Cowart is what other religious groups they found also use pain in a spiritual context. I know of a few, myself, including schools of Zen Buddhism, and would have loved to have them alongside Cowart’s examples, as well.

Similarly, I greatly appreciated Cowarat’s exploration of the link between the psychological, emotional, and the physical, in categorizing and inscribing pain in the bodymind. I know firsthand that graduate school and academic research is often about enduring the emotional and psychological kinds of pain, for the sake of something more coming out of it, as well as for what we believe we can achieve in that moment, and so I would have loved even a bit more in psychological and emotional veins, too.

But, of course, when writing a book, we have the time we have, and the time that Leigh Cowart took to research and write their book was well worth it.

Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose is an illuminating, joyous, deeply emotional examination of what makes pain what it is, what makes pain mean what means, and why. And what could be more fitting for one of the most intimate, personal, and universal experiences of the human species.

Hurts So Good is out now from Public Affairs and Hachette, and if you want more from Leigh, you can check out their appearance on NPr’s The 1a.

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[Cover to Elizabeth A Wilson’s Affect and Artificial Intelligence]

J.Lorand Matory’s The Fetish Revisited looks at a particular section of the history of European-Atlantic and Afro-Atlantic conceptual engagement, namely the place where Afro-Atlantic religious and spiritual practices were taken up and repackaged by white German men. Matory demonstrates that Marx and Freud took the notion of the Fetish and repurposed its meaning and intent, further arguing that this is a product of the both of the positionality of both of these men in their historical and social contexts. Both Marx and Freud, Matory says, Jewish men of potentially-indeterminate ethnicity who could have been read as “mulatto,” and whose work was designed to place them in the good graces of the white supremacist, or at least dominantly hierarchical power structure in which they lived.

Matory combines historiography,anthropology, ethnography, oral history, critical engagement Marxist and Freudian theory and, religious studies, and personal memoir to show that the Fetish is mutually a constituting category, one rendered out of the intersection of individuals, groups, places, needs, and objects. Further, he argues, by trying to use the fetish to mark out a category of “primitive savagery,” both Freud and Marx actually succeeded in making fetishes of their own theoretical frameworks, both in the original sense, and their own pejorative senses.

Both of these books deal in what it takes for nonhuman assemblages to come alive, both pointing to Bruno Latour’s work in laboratory studies, his reimagining of Critique, and his Actor Network Theory to think through the social construction of groups, places, artifacts, and knowledge that have come to comprise artificial intelligence, fetishes, and various theoretical communities. Where Wilson looks directly at the lack of consideration of affect relation in what it means for a mind to develop, Matory traces how specific white Europeans took up and misapplied Afro-Atlantic concepts to the purpose of raising themselves above or differentiating themselves from the black Africans who developed those concepts. Both specifically work to discuss the role that socio-cultural context play in the development of the people involved in creating these theories, and both use the concept of introjection as a touchstone.

Introjection, for Freud, was the inverse of projection, and so rather than putting one’s own qualities out onto someone else, one would take qualities which were not theirs into themselves, and this is the reading that Matory uses to talk about Marx and Freud’s appropriation of the subjugated and oppressed lived experiences of Afro-Atlantic peoples. But Wilson uses Sándor Ferenczi’s original rendering of the term introjection, meaning the quality of the neurotic process of reaching out for objects to bring inside ourselves, saying that this helps explain why humans can get into affective relations with machines. Each of these renderings of the term highlights a movement from outside to inside, and an unconscious engagement with made things that may not, on first reading, be a part of us.

[Cover Image of J. Lorand Matory’s The Fetish Revisited; Cover art: Kota reliquary statue (SABA Collection E012), from the Sacred Arts of the Black Atlantic Collection at Duke University.]

Oddly, Matory touches on Freud and Ferenczi’s relationship a great deal, but does not play out the disagreements about introjection, a move which could be both constructive and illuminating to his project. Similarly, Wilson’s project would have benefited from spending more time thinking about both affect and disability studies and the different ways that the affective relationship is rendered for autistic individuals. With the high prevalence of Autism within practitioners of the computer sciences, this could be illustrative of the social engagements she marks out, elsewhere in the text. In fact, both Wilson and Matory could use a bit more engagement disability and other marginalized intersections, and I am, in particular, hopeful that Matory’s next book will explore the intersection Afro-Atlantic peoples who engage in non-normative sexuality, as this text seemed to put those at off-axes, rather than as a potential crossroads.

On the whole, both Matory and Wilson are writing about places where our socio-historical contexts can help us to better understand what it is that we are trying to build, both in terms of theoretical and physical objects. In fact, for both of these authors, it is crucial that we understand that the theoretical, the social, the symbolic, the emotional, the semiotic, and the epistemological, are all in tension with each other, and that none takes primacy over the other, as we create and are created by assemblages of the human and the nonhuman.

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The 1965 translation of Frantz Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism, on the other hand, is a single coherent text exploring the clinical psychological and sociological implications of the Algerian Revolution. Fanon uses soldiers’ first person accounts, as well as his own psychological and medical training, to explore the impact of the war and its tactics on the individual psychologies, the familial relationships, and the social dynamics of the Algerian people, arguing that the damage and horrors of war and colonialism have placed the Algerians and the French in a new relational mode.

[Image: A copy of the 1961 paperback edition of Frantz Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism, featuring a sea of dark-skinned people with upraised hands, coloured in diagonal bands of orange, red, and magenta.]

From within the new mode described by Fanon, the French cannot expect the Algerians to “go back to the way it was,” because the Algerians have changed too much in their struggle for freedom, against the French. Fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, siblings, all relate to each other differently now—all are either willing to kill, be killed, or facilitate the killing of the French in service of the revolution. Tools such as radio and the European medical training of Algerian doctors, both of which were once symbols of colonialism, have been reappropriated and redeployed in service of the revolution.

Fanon says that, with this being the case, there is no going back: a new way forward must be devised, and in this way the French must recognize and acknowledge what they have done to the Algerian people, and must come to fully see them as they are, not as the French wish they were, when they were first colonized. In this way, Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism lays the groundwork for a great many resistance and liberation movements, including those in the crip/disability community, enabling those struggling for liberation to demand that their status and self-definition be acknowledged by those who have subjugated and materially caused their oppression.

In Criptiques, this liberation struggle is rendered in the form of over two-dozen minds and voices grappling with what it means to be disabled, to be perceived as disabled, to be understood as disabled by the medical establishment, or society. People suffering temporary head injuries wonder “am I disabled enough to be part of this community?” and “do I only think of myself as not disabled because of my internalized ableism?” The authors in Criptiques all represent multiple intersections of gender and race and differing formulations and understandings of disability, and their stories all play out within structures of power and oppression put in place by non-disabled people, as they work to be understood on the terms they choose.

Each piece details various weights of microaggressions, outright hostility, or reflexive expectations in which a disabled person has to wonder about what other people are wondering about them, all while navigating the physical and social structures of a world which isn’t built for them. This comes out, in the whole text, even when it isn’t explicitly described in the individual pieces.

To an extent, my only critique of Criptiques is something of a paradox, in that I wish it were slightly more explicitly thematic in each of its texts. However, had it been more explicit, in that way, that might easily have dampened the breadth and creativity of the expressions of lived experience, an outcome which would have been antithetical to the drive and goal of the book.

For Fanon’s part, there’s some uninterrogated casual sexism, in chapter one, when he discusses how depredations on women act as evidence of occupier’s brutality, and I’m inclined to say there’s not enough interrogation of the view of Algerian-sympathizing white Europeans, as presented in chapter five. No matter how much they might sympathize as allies, these European would still materially benefit from the colonialist structure, and while they might be able to use that to the revolution’s advantage, it would still make them complicit. While discourse around power and privilege was perhaps not yet as nuanced as today, Fanon shows elements of this kind of analysis elsewhere, so why not here?

[Image of the cover of Criptiques: the title centered at the top on a blue background, with the words “Edited by Cailtin Wood” centered at the bottom]

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In Kelly Oliver’s The Colonization of Psychic Space­, she constructs and argues for a new theory of subjectivity and individuation—one predicated on a radical forgiveness born of interrelationality and reconciliation between self and culture. Oliver argues that we have neglected to fully explore exactly how sublimation functions in the creation of the self,saying that oppression leads to a unique form of alienation which never fully allows the oppressed to learn to sublimate—to translate their bodily impulses into articulated modes of communication—and so they cannot become a full individual, only ever struggling against their place in society, never fully reconciling with it.

These works are very different, so obviously, to achieve their goals, Brown and Oliver lean on distinct tools,methodologies, and sources. Brown focuses on the techniques of religious studies as he examines a religious history: historiography, anthropology, sociology, and linguistic and narrative analysis. He explores the written records and first person accounts of enslaved peoples and their captors, as well as the contextualizing historical documents of Black liberation theorists who were contemporary to the time frame he discusses. Oliver’s project is one of social psychology, and she explores it through the lenses of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis,social construction theory, Hegelian dialectic, and the works of Franz Fanon. She is looking to build psycho-social analysis that takes both the social and the individual into account, fundamentally asking the question “How do we belong to the social as singular?”

[Cover image of African-Atlantic Cultures and the South Carolina Lowcountry, monochrome image of three Black people dressed in white, standing in a riving in the middle of a forest]

While at first it might seem like there is nothing to compare in these texts—one is a religious history, and the other a theory of psychosocial development—the relation between the two books can be found in the title of the second. Each of these books works to explore how psychic space is colonized, resisted, and interrelated, at the levels of the individual, the culture, and the wider society. For Brown, we are looking a fundamental question of how enslaved people were brought to a new land against their will, but still managed to maintain a sense of cultural cohesion and selfhood, even as they adapted and changed to their new horrifying situations.

The land in which they found themselves was framed in a cultural and spiritual mode they could understand and relate to, and which, in many ways, allowed them to find a resonance with the home they had lost. The simbi spirits—or those spirits’ cousins—were waiting for them, when they arrived, and so they were able to related and navigate this new world. But the world changed those relations, as well, made them more transactional, more hierarchical than they used to be; the pressure of their oppression shaped and reframed what they needed from themselves and their community, both physical and spiritual.

For Oliver, we’re looking at a process whereby the alienation unique to oppression relates to the fluid reflexive transmission of affect—specifically, the transmission of negative affects from the colonizer to the colonized. This, Oliver says, is the source of what Fanon notes as the obsessive and phobic neuroses of blacks and whites,respectively. This alienation is different for when it’s both gendered and racialized, but the alienation is clearly and specifically compounded by sexism. As Oliver says, “if women are less able to sublimate than men, it is not because of women’s anatomy, psychology, or individual pathologies but rather because of social repression and the lack of social support required for sublimation.”

Ultimately, for Oliver, oppressed peoples are read and understood differently and are given far less leeway to rebel and individuate themselves,thus remain underdeveloped and unknown to themselves and the world. Singularity,in Oliver’s view comes from reconciliation within the tension of self and society, not the alienation from it. But colonization and oppression are the imposition of values on others, rather than the radical acceptance of the subject, and so this must be corrected, first, if there is tobe any justice. Ethics, she says, is about making meaning in a relational mode,and so the conversation of subjectivities is inherently the most ethical society we can have.

[Cover image of The Colonization of Psychic Space]

There are a few problems with these texts, but only a few. While the scope of Brown’s research is a particular range of times, he still has too few connections to modern-day transformations of the simbi. The early twentieth century is not likely the end of that discussion, and I think the overall discussion would be enhanced by at least a nod to where many of these practices stand, today. For Oliver’s part, though looking at issues of gender, race, and oppression,and writing in the early 21^st century, there is no mention let alone exploration of the structural oppression of transgender or disabled folx; this is fairly large oversight for someone writing about oppression and identity formation, in 2004. Additionally, even though she uses the theory, throughout,she only once mentions intersectionality by name, in the bibliographic reference for a chapter three endnote; that endnote is also the only place she mentions Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw by name. That erasure is a bit ironic for a work about the ways oppression renders out or negates the identities of certain types of Subjects.

Both Brown’s African-Atlantic Cultures… and Oliver’s Colonization of Psychic Space explore oppression and colonization can shape knowledge, culture, beliefs, and practices. For Brown, the exploration takes the form of a specific, large-scale cultural cross over in the American Southeast. For Oliver, the key is how cultural modes of expression affect a person’s subjectivity position and individuation—their process of becoming wholly themselves. For each of these authors, the main point of importance is in recognizing that these selves, these cultures, these beliefs and societies, are developed in and depend on a deep understanding of the interrelation between individual and culture, body and spirit, and life and death. Whether simbi or self, we cannot know one, without the other.

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That is, all of the categories of “human,” “animal,” “technological,” “natural,” and more are far more porous than people tend to admit and their boundaries should be challenged; this understanding of the cyborg gives us the tools to do so. Richardson, on the other hand, seeks to argue that what it means to be human has been devalued by the drive to render human capacities and likenesses into machines, and that this drive arises from the male-dominated and otherwise socialized spaces in which these systems are created. The more we elide the distinction between the human and the machine, the more we will harm human beings and human relationships.

Midson’s training is in theology and religious studies, and so it’s no real surprise that he primarily uses theological exegesis (and specifically an exegesis of Genesis creation stories), but he also deploys the tools of cyborg anthropology (specifically Donna Haraway’s 1991 work on cyborgs), sociology, anthropology, and comparative religious studies. He engages in interdisciplinary narrative analysis and comparison,exploring the themes from several pieces of speculative fiction media and the writings of multiple theorists from several disciplines.

Richardson uses methods from anthropology (specifically ethnographic methods), sociological and psychological analysis, Marxist historical and labour analysis, and literary narrative analysis. Richardson did participant observations at MIT’s AI and Robotics Lab and, much like Midson, she brings in and analyzes several pieces of speculative fiction media in light of this, to lend weight to her overall argument.

[Image of the front cover of Scott Midson’s Cyborg Theology: Humans, Technology, and God; white text above what appears to be a mechanical hinge and socket joint in the center of a background of concentric circles in different shades of green, dark at the outside, to very light inside]

While Cyborg Theology and An Anthropology of Robots and AI share a few similarities in terms of themes and texts analyzed, they each go in radically different directions, in regards to arguments and recommendations. For Midson, the point of understanding the history of human-machine entanglements, through both fictional and nonfictional narrative, is to understand what it is that humans have been trying to do, and what has been done, instead. Midson is fundamentally arguing that while the way we have done things has caused sociocultural and ecological harm, that harm has come in the form of a disconnection from the world and everything in it.

Midson’s goal is to take this notion—the cyborg—and use it to rehabilitate this breakage, to ensure that humans understand themselves as having always been apart of the wider enmeshment or assemblage of the world. Richardson, however, sees the project of human-machine interaction as forfeit, on its face, in that she believes it fundamentally misunderstands what humans derive from human relationships, and in trying to replicate in a machine that which it doesn’t understand, it degrades the capacity of humans to relate to each other, let alone anything else.

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For Heyes, that exploration takes the form of three case studies: The hermeneutics of transgender individuals, especially trans women; the “Askeses” (self-discipline practices) of organized weight loss dieting programs; and “Attempts to represent the subjectivity of cosmetic surgery patients.” Schalk’s site of interrogation is Black women speculative fiction authors and the ways in which their writing illuminates new understandings of race, gender, and what Schalk terms “(dis)ability.

Both Heyes and Schalk focus on popular culture and they both center gender as a valence of investigation because the embodied experience of women in western society is the crux point for multiple intersecting pressures.

Heyes’ goal throughout her text isn’t to state that there is perfect analogy between trans folx, weight loss program adherents, and cosmetic surgery recipients. Rather, Heyes believes that by investigating each of these, in turn, we can understand something further about how societal pressures and normativities put pressure on each group in ways that limit their capability for authentic intersubjective self-generation. She argues that, through our relationships to societal images, we become complicit in our own colonization and adherence to these norms.

In the case of trans women, Heyes explores the long history of arguments from within certain strands of second wave feminism which either pathologize the desire for gender reassignment, discount the experience as that of “men who think they’re women,” or, at best, claim that trans individuals don’t go far enough in transgressing against gender norms. For weight loss program adherents—the site at which Heyes inserts herself into the text—images of thinness and idealized skinny bodies, and notions of “virtuous self-discipline” complicate the relationship between someone who wants to change how they see themselves and their image in the mirror; is this really for them, or is it for the world?

[Image of the cover of Self-Transformations]

In Bodyminds, Schalk sets out to do exactly what is laid out in the subtitle of the text: explore (dis)ability, race, and gender in and via black women’s speculative fiction. Schalk uses tools and methods from disability studies, Black feminist studies, women and gender studies, and literary analysis to place works by Octavia E Butler, Phyllis Alesia Perry, N.K. Jemisin, Shawntelle Madison, and Nalo Hopkinson in conversation, and to examine what those works can teach us about the possibility space we might be able to carve for thinking differently about all of those subjectivities. To do this work, Schalk defines a few specific terms and tools, such as intersectionality, Crip Theory, Bodyminds, and (dis)ability.

The term “Bodymind” comes from disability theorist Margaret Price who says that the term has to do its own theoretical work, and can’t just be thought of as “Mind+Body;” rather it is the continual interplay and integration of that cohesive, fluctuating whole. Schalk defines (Dis)ability as the “overarching social system of bodily and mental norms that includes ability and disability,” noting that this “also highlights the mutual dependency of disability and ability to define one another.” (Dis)ability is about the relationality and the porous movement between categories, rather than any static state. Additionally, this framing can accommodate superpowers, extrasensory perception, magic, etc., examinations of which are crucial to Schalk’s project.

Schalk begins each chapter with introduction sections and the chapters themselves build on each other, while also sitting whole individual essays. All jargon is defined and explained, and assumptions are critically investigated. Chapter 1, “Metaphor and Materiality,” uses Butler’s Kindred to explore the neo-slave narrative genre, which Schalk describes as working to reclaim those edges of brutal truth which more traditional slave narratives sanded down. Schalk uses speculative fiction specifically because it allows for a new way to examine the categories of race, gender, and (dis)ability. No other genre, Schalk says, allows for the elements of a character’s lived experience and identity to be read as both metaphor and material textual reality, something which it is crucial to do if we want to ensure that representations of disability are more than tokenistic and ableist disability metaphors.

From there, Schalk goes on to deconstruct the notions of able-Mindedness, the implications not having of disability representation in texts about the future, and the wider implications of this kind of work for black feminism and disability studies. Throughout the text, Schalk explores how each of the works under investigation engage in a process of either carefully rendering that metaphor/material conjunction, or of “defamiliarizing” the concepts we think we understand. In the end, Schalk argues for a full intersectional engagement of this (dis)ability, race, gender, and culture, because all categories of oppression “are constantly shifting and shaping each other.”

 

[Image of the cover of Bodyminds Reimagined]

While both of these texts are fantastically useful, there are a couple of problems that stood out, in my reading. First, while Heyes herself is not trans, and she explicitly says that she doesn’t want to overstep by trying to speak for trans folx, much of her conversation in chapter two could easily be taken as an invalidating stance on trans lived identity; even though this text is 12 years old, much of Heyes’ language regarding trans individuals is outdated, even at that point. Later, Heyes seems to more clearly view trans folx as valid and criticisms from outside as “imposed constrictions” of the kind of power and valence operations she wants to challenge, throughout, but that’s not well foreshadowed, here.

Similarly, I would have liked more exploration of the operations of normative bodies and power in relation to disability and prostheses; the lack makes me wonder whether it’s excluded specifically because it constitutes a drastically different quality to the relations laid out, in the rest of the text. Schalk, for her part, could have spent more time in the final chapter, and throughout the book, examining the notion of gender in relation to the intersection of trans lives, Black lives, and (dis)ability, as that space seems like it would be extremely fruitful, in this context. Additionally, Schalk’s discussion of the lack of disability representations in fiction about the future makes only second hand parenthetical reference to the Star Trek universe, when that shows representations and failures thereof have informed conversations within the speculative fiction community for decades.

On the whole, both of Sami Schalk and Cressida J Heyes have presented research which shows the operations of sociocultural norms, narratives, and imaginaries translate into the perceived possibilities and lived experiences of a wide range of people, and especially women. For Heyes, those norms, narratives, and imaginaries are often oppressive and restrictive, and must be examined, explored, and understood in order to be more thoroughly resisted. For Schalk, our narrative and imaginary spaces are the most fertile sites for resistance and exploration of new ways of understanding the world… as long as we recognize and push back against the ableism, misogyny, and anti-Black racism with which our society works to infuse them.

While there is some difference between the concept of the bodymind and Heyes’ construction of identity and interiority, I contend that we can use bodyminds as a site to bring a non-normative, process-based notion of the self into Heyes’ arguments about normativity. Through this, we can argue that, if there is anything like a “True Self,” it’s that self which is always embodied and in process of becoming, and so changes to the body necessarily change this self, but in a way that is almost trivially true: Changes to our embodiment change who we are and how we think, but who we are and how we think can lead us to change our embodiment.

For both Heyes and Schalk, in order to effectively resist oppression and open a space for marginalize people to fully live in their embodiments, we have to know, demonstrate, and practice more modes of being, and on my reading, the intersection of both of their works holds the beginnings of a rich methodology for achieving exactly this.

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My first two books in this process were Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and David J. Gunkel’s The Machine Question, and while I didn’t initially have plans for the texts to thematically link, the first foray made it pretty clear that patterns would emerge whether I consciously intended or not.

[Image of a careworn copy of Frantz Fanon’s BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS, showing a full-on image of a Black man’s face wearing a white anonymizing eye-mask.]

For Fanon, that otherness is that of the Black man in the west, in the 1950’s and 60’s, specifically the consideration of how Blackness is and always has been defined in relation to whiteness. For Gunkel, the otherness is a more wide-ranging process of Othering, in which that to which we owe moral consideration is defined in reference to what it is not, and how we need to consider that the potential moral positionality of machines might well reflect the space occupied by nonhuman animals and many other categories of human beings.

In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon outlines a mode of thinking about the nature of Blackness as something that is unknowable, in its present situation, and claims that he’s not looking to simply theorize about the condition of the Black man, in the world, but rather to discuss ways to change it. Blackness is unknowable because it is a category defined always in the negative, as against white, and by mechanisms of oppression and resistance. When not engaged in that resistance and phobia of their skin and their supposed animal nature, Black people have their Blackness erased by being told the converse: That they are so close to being white that they “aren’t really black.”

Fanon notes that the faculties and tools Black people have to use are those of Western European colonization and, as such, are subject to the same double thinking: If you use it to agree with white Western European colonial mindsets, then you’re “white enough” for your thinking to be accepted; but if you use those tools to seek to deconstruct them, then you’re “not reasoning correctly.”

[Image of the cover of David J. Gunkel’s The Machine Question]

In The Machine Question, Gunkel describes the need for a new way to understand moral agency and moral patiency and to extend them to the ever-widening category of machines with which humans live and interact. He lays out the standard picture in which in order for something to be a moral patient—that is, something worthy of moral consideration—it must first be capable of being a moral agent, or acting with an understanding of itself and its moral situatedness, in the world, and that many believe that in order for that to be the case, one has to first be a conscious agent.

Gunkel rightly describes the problems with these and other views, all hinging primarily upon the fact that we do not have solid definitions for categories like “consciousness” or “suffering” that we can reliably apply to other human beings, let alone being able to definitively include or exclude other nonhuman entities from them. But, Gunkel says, anthropocentric exclusion is exactly what we do, in all ethical system. Even when we seek to build systems such as Luciano Floridi’s Informational Ethics, which is founded on the proposition that any and all things which exist as “coherent [bodies] of information” are worthy of moral consideration, we are still engaged in colonial violence toward whatever is told it doesn’t fit our criteria.

Both Fanon and Gunkel’s works examine the ways in which the colonial Western project is replicated throughout categories of people, or even who gets to be considered a person, but both writers have curious lacunae in the case studies and precedents from which they draw. While Fanon is clear at the outset that he is focusing on the nature of the Black Man in France in the Mid-Late 20^th Century, his reasons for excluding Black Women as a particular perspective of inquiry are not well developed. Similarly, his language rife with what might easily be seen as homophobic and transphobic undertones, even beyond that which would be explained away by the era in which he wrote.

In a similar vein, while Gunkel somewhat offhandedly repeats that women and people of colour were not always accorded full personhood status, he does not mention the very real and very pertinent issues disabled people still face, to this day, in being seen as full agents and self-directed patients. When the topic of consideration touches so closely to issues of mental capacity and capability, such a lack should perhaps at least be highlighted with a “though I lack the space to do so, here…”

[A scene from Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. , showing 2 humans (left) and 3 robots (right).]

References:
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. (1952), (1967 translation by Charles Lam Markmann: New York: Grove Press).

Gunkel, David J. The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots, and Ethics. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2012.

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Here are some things that are true about GNOMON:

This book is and is about magic, machine consciousness, and communities of resistance, in the weirdest ways possible.

It is exactly 666 pages long.

This book has four or five or six main threads, and it weaves all of them around and through all of them, each enveloping and enfolding each, wrapping around the outside only to then traverse it and find that you are inside of and beneath the next layer in the line.

The entire book resonates with Borges, Hofstadter, Danielewski, Butler, and LeGuin, without imitation.

Each one of these personages appears or seems to appear, but just when you think you’re sure how they’ll be seen, they are not there, like a shark fin in the ocean that becomes and always was the wave of the sea you’re swimming in and then, again, or maybe never, churns and is the shark: No less deeply and immediately important for the reminder of what is in there with you, and quietly unsettling for upending what you think you know…

GNOMON is the kind of thing that you know is behaving as intended when one of the metaphors/similes/analogies you’ve decided to use to describe it shows up in it the day after you think of it.

It is almost impossible to spoil this book without telling you literally all of the events of this book, but I also don’t want to colour your intake, too much, other than to say that this book is important. There is mystery in it, and there’s art. It is a masterful thing, and if all you see is the surface plot of it, then you’ve missed the central conceit of the thing.

If you have not already done so, definitely get it, when you get a chance.

Nick Harkaway’s GNOMON is available from Penguin Books.

The post Review of Nick Harkaway’s GNOMON appeared first on Technoccult.

I led them through with questions like “What do you take phenomenology to mean?” and “what do you think of the possibility of a machine having a phenomenology of its own?” We discussed different definitions of “language” and “communication” and “body,” and unfortunately didn’t have a conversation about how certain definitions of those terms mean that what would be considered language between cats would be a cat communicating via signalling to humans.

It was a really great conversation and the Live Stream video for this is here, and linked below (for now, but it may go away at some point, to be replaced by a static youtube link; when I know that that’s happened, I will update links and embeds, here).

Read the rest of Nonhuman and Nonbiological Phenomenology at A Future Worth Thinking About

Additionally,  I have another quote about the philosophical and sociopolitical implications of machine intelligence in this extremely well-written piece by K.G. Orphanides at WIRED UK. From the Article:

Williams, a specialist in the ethics and philosophy of nonhuman consciousness, argues that such systems need to be built differently to avoid a a corporate race for the best threat analysis and response algorithms which [will be] likely to [see the world as] a “zero-sum game” where only one side wins. “This is not a perspective suited to devise, for instance, a thriving flourishing life for everything on this planet, or a minimisation of violence and warfare,” he adds.

Much more about this, from many others, at the link.

Until Next Time.

The post Pieces on Machine Consciousness appeared first on Technoccult.

The pdf of the article gives specific page references. Shortlink: https://wp.me/p1Bfg0-3US]

[Image of an eye in a light-skinned face; the iris and pupil have been replaced with a green neutral-faced emoji; by Stu Jones via CJ Sorg on Flickr / Creative Commons]

Shannon Vallor’s most recent book, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting takes a look at what she calls the “Acute Technosocial Opacity” of the 21^st century, a state in which technological, societal, political, and human-definitional changes occur at such a rapid-yet-shallow pace that they block our ability to conceptualize and understand them.[1]

Vallor is one of the most publicly engaged technological ethicists of the past several years, and much of her work’s weight comes from its direct engagement with philosophy—both philosophy of technology and various virtue ethical traditions—and the community of technological development and innovation that is Silicon Valley. It’s from this immersive perspective that Vallor begins her work in Virtues.

Vallor contends that we need a new way of understanding the projects of human flourishing and seeking the good life, and understanding which can help us reexamine how we make and participate through and with the technoscientific innovations of our time. The project of this book, then, is to provide the tools to create this new understanding, tools which Vallor believes can be found in an examination and synthesis of the world’s three leading Virtue Ethical Traditions: Aristotelian ethics, Confucian Ethics, and Buddhism.

Vallor breaks the work into three parts, and takes as her subject what she considers to be the four major world-changing technologies of the 21^st century.  The book’s three parts are, “Foundations for a Technomoral Virtue Ethic,” “Cultivating the Self: Classical Virtue Traditions as Contemporary Guide,” and “Meeting the Future with Technomoral Wisdom, OR How To Live Well with Emerging Technologies.” The four world changing technologies, considered at length in Part III, are Social Media, Surveillance, Robotics/Artificial Intelligence, and Biomedical enhancement technologies.[2]

As Vallor moves through each of the three sections and four topics, she maintains a constant habit of returning to the questions of exactly how each one will either help us cultivate a new technomoral virtue ethic, or how said ethic would need to be cultivated, in order to address it. As both a stylistic and pedagogical choice, this works well, providing touchstones of reinforcement that mirror the process of intentional cultivation she discusses throughout the book.

Flourishing and Technology

In Part I, “Foundations,” Vallor covers both the definitions of her terms and the argument for her project. Chapter 1, “Virtue Ethics, Technology, and Human Flourishing,” begins with the notion of virtue as a continuum that gets cultivated, rather than a fixed end point of achievement. She notes that while there are many virtue traditions with their own ideas about what it means to flourish, there is a difference between recognizing multiple definitions of flourishing and a purely relativist claim that all definitions of flourishing are equal.[3] Vallor engages these different understandings of flourishing, throughout the text, but she also looks at other ethical traditions, to explore how they would handle the problem of technosocial opacity.

Without resorting to strawmen, Vallor examines The Kantian Categorical Imperative and Utilitarianism, in turn. She demonstrates that Kant’s ethics would result in us trying to create codes of behavior that are either always right, or always wrong (“Never Murder;” “Always Tell the Truth”), and Utilitarian consequentialism would allow us to make excuses for horrible choices in the name of “the Greater Good.” Which is to say nothing of how nebulous, variable, and incommensurate all of our understandings of “utility” and “good” will be with each other. Vallor says that rigid rules-based nature of each of these systems simply can’t account for the variety of experiences and challenges humans are likely to face in life.

Not only that, but deontological and consequentialist ethics have always been this inflexible, and this inflexibility will only be more of a problem in the face of the challenges posed by the speed and potency of the four abovementioned technologies.[4] Vallor states that the technologies of today are more likely to facilitate a “technological convergence,” in which they “merge synergistically” and become more powerful and impactful than the sum of their parts. She says that these complex, synergistic systems of technology cannot be responded to and grappled with via rigid rules.[5]

Vallor then folds in discussion of several of her predecessors in the philosophy of technology—thinkers like Hans Jonas and Albert Borgmann—giving a history of the conceptual frameworks by which philosophers have tried to deal with technological drift and lurch. From here, she decides that each of these theorists has helped to get us part of the way, but their theories all need some alterations in order to fully succeed.[6]

In Chapter 2, “The Case for a Global Technomoral Virtue Ethic,” Vallor explores the basic tenets of Aristotelian, Confucian, and Buddhist ethics, laying the groundwork for the new system she hopes to build. She explores each of their different perspectives on what constitutes The Good Life in moderate detail, clearly noting that there are some aspects of these systems that are incommensurate with “virtue” and “good” as we understand them, today.[7] Aristotle, for instance, believed that some people were naturally suited to be slaves, and that women were morally and intellectually inferior to men, and the Buddha taught that women would always have a harder time attaining the enlightenment of Nirvana.

Rather than simply attempting to repackage old ones for today’s challenges, these ancient virtue traditions can teach us something about the shared commitments of virtue ethics, more generally. Vallor says that what we learn from them will fuel the project of building a wholly new virtue tradition. To discuss their shared underpinnings, she talks about “thick” and “thin” moral concepts.[8] A thin moral concept is defined here as only the “skeleton of an idea” of morality, while a thick concept provides the rich details that make each tradition unique. If we look at the thin concepts, Vallor says, we can see the bone structure of these traditions is made of 4 shared commitments:

• To the Highest Human Good (whatever that may be);
• That moral virtues understood to be cultivated states of character;
• To a practical path of moral self-cultivation; and
• That we can have a conception of what humans are generally like.[9]

Vallor uses these commitments to build a plausible definition of “flourishing,” looking at things like intentional practice within a global community toward moral goods internal to that practice, a set of criteria from Alasdair MacIntyre which she adopts and expands on, [10] These goals are never fully realized, but always worked toward, and always with a community. All of this is meant to be supported by and to help foster goods like global community, intercultural understanding, and collective human wisdom.

We need a global technomoral virtue ethics because while the challenges we face require ancient virtues such as courage and charity and community, they’re now required to handle ethical deliberations at a scope the world has never seen.

But Vallor says that a virtue tradition, new or old, need not be universal in order to do real, lasting work; it only needs to be engaged in by enough people to move the global needle. And while there may be differences in rendering these ideas from one person or culture to the next, if we do the work of intentional cultivation of a pluralist ethics, then we can work from diverse standpoints, toward one goal.[11]

To do this, we will need to intentionally craft both ourselves and our communities and societies. This is because not everyone considers the same goods as good, and even our agreed-upon values play out in vastly different ways when they’re sought by billions of different people in complex, fluid situations.[12] Only with intention can we exclude systems which group things like intentional harm and acceleration of global conflict under the umbrella of “technomoral virtues.”

Cultivating Techno-Ethics

Part II does the work of laying out the process of technomoral cultivation. Vallor’s goal is to examine what we can learn by focusing on the similarities and crucial differences of other virtue traditions. Starting in chapter 3, Vallor once again places Aristotle, Kongzi (Confucius), and the Buddha in conceptual conversation, asking what we can come to understand from each. From there, she moves on to detailing the actual process of cultivating the technomoral self, listing seven key intentional practices that will aid in this:

• Moral Habituation
• Relational Understanding
• Reflective Self-Examination
• Intentional Self-Direction of Moral Development
• Perceptual Attention to Moral Salience
• Prudential Judgment
• Appropriate Extension of Moral Concern[13]

Vallor moves through each of these in turn, taking the time to show how each step resonates with the historical virtue traditions she’s used as orientation markers, thus far, while also highlighting key areas of their divergence from those past theories.

Vallor says that the most important thing to remember is that each step is a part of a continual process of training and becoming; none of them is some sort of final achievement by which we will “become moral,” and some are that less than others. Moral Habituation is the first step on this list, because it is the quality at the foundation of all of the others: constant cultivation of the kind of person you want to be. And, we have to remember that while all seven steps must be undertaken continually, they also have to be undertaken communally. Only by working with others can we build systems and societies necessary to sustain these values in the world.

In Chapter 6, “Technomoral Wisdom for an Uncertain Future,” Vallor provides “a taxonomy of technomoral virtues.”[14] The twelve concepts she lists—honesty, self-control, humility, justice, courage, empathy, care, civility, flexibility, perspective, magnanimity, and technomoral wisdom—are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all possible technomoral virtues.

Rather, these twelve things together form system by which to understand the most crucial qualities for dealing with our 21^st century lives. They’re all listed with “associated virtues,” which help provide a boarder and deeper sense of the kinds of conceptual connections we can achieve via relational engagement with all virtues.[15] Each member of the list should support and be supported by not only the other members, but also any as-yet-unknown or -undiscovered virtues.

Here, Vallor continues a pattern she’s established throughout the text of grounding potentially unfamiliar concepts in a frame of real-life technological predicaments from the 20^th or 21^st century. Scandals such as Facebook privacy controversies, the flash crash of 2010, or even the moral stances (or lack thereof) of CEO’s and engineers are discussed with a mind toward highlighting the final virtue: Technomoral Wisdom.[16] Technomoral Wisdom is a means of being able to unify the other virtues, and to understand the ways in which our challenges interweave with and reflect each other. In this way we can both cultivate virtuous responses within ourselves and our existing communities, and also begin to more intentionally create new individual, cultural, and global systems.

Applications and Transformations

In Part III, Vallor puts to the test everything that we’ve discussed so far, placing all of the principles, practices, and virtues in direct, extensive conversation with the four major technologies that frame the book. Exploring how new social media, surveillance cultures, robots and AI, and biomedical enhancement technologies are set to shape our world in radically new ways, and how we can develop new habits of engagement with them. Each technology is explored in its own chapter so as to better explore which virtues best suit which topic, which good might be expressed by or in spite of each field, and which cultivation practices will be required within each. In this way, Vallor highlights the real dangers of failing to skillfully adapt to the requirements of each of these unprecedented challenges.

While Vallor considers most every aspect of this project in great detail, there are points throughout the text where she seems to fall prey to some of the same technological pessimism, utopianism, or determinism for which she rightly calls out other thinkers, in earlier chapters. There is still a sense that these technologies are, of their nature, terrifying, and that all we can do is rein them in.

Additionally, her crucial point seems to be that through intentional cultivation of the self and our society, or that through our personally grappling with these tasks, we can move the world, a stance which leaves out, for instance, notions of potential socioeconomic or political resistance to these moves. There are those with a vested interest in not having a more mindful and intentional technomoral ethos, because that would undercut how they make their money. However, it may be that this is Vallor’s intent.

The audience and goal for this book seems to be ethicists who will be persuaded to become philosophers of technology, who will then take up this book’s understandings and go speak to policy makers and entrepreneurs, who will then make changes in how they deal with the public. If this is the case, then there will already be a shared conceptual background between Vallor and many of the other scholars whom she intends to make help her to do the hard work of changing how people think about their values. But those philosophers will need a great deal more power, oversight authority, and influence to effectively advocate for and implement what Vallor suggests, here, and we’ll need sociopolitical mechanisms for making those valuative changes, as well.

While the implications of climate catastrophes, dystopian police states, just-dumb-enough AI, and rampant gene hacking seem real, obvious, and avoidable to many of us, many others take them as merely naysaying distractions from the good of technosocial progress and the ever-innovating free market.[17] With that in mind, we need tools with which to begin the process of helping people understand why they ought to care about technomoral virtue, even when they have such large, driving incentives not to.

Without that, we are simply presenting people who would sell everything about us for another dollar with the tools by which to make a more cultivated, compassionate, and interrelational world, and hoping that enough of them understand the virtue of those tools, before it is too late. Technology and the Virtues is a fantastic schematic for a set of these tools.

Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting is out in paperback, June 1st, 2018. Read the original version of “Cultivating Technomoral Interrelations: A Review of Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the Virtues” at the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective.

References

Vallor, Shannon. Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a World Worth Wanting New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

[1] Shannon Vallor, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a World Worth Wanting (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016) ,6.

[2] Ibid., 10.

[3] Ibid., 19—21.

[4] Ibid., 22—26.

[5] Ibid. 28.

[6] Ibid., 28—32.

[7] Ibid., 35.

[8] Ibid., 43.

[9] Ibid., 44.

[10] Ibid., 45—47.

[11] Ibid., 54—55.

[12] Ibid., 51.

[13] Ibid., 64.

[14] Ibid., 119.

[15] Ibid., 120.

[16] Ibid., 122—154.

[17] Ibid., 249—254.

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